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Topic: Linux (Read 6020 times)

I know you will do Linux at release like you said, and did, for you previous game, and it's great. Somehow sad not to be able to be part of the testing phases, but it's not a big deal, if Linux is well commited then.

I open this only to gather the players who would play it on Linux.

What's your systems ?

My system (from 2015, no hardware upgrad since) :

I use PlayOnLinux/WINE to play a few Windows games, but the vaste majority of them are Linux-friendly.

I'm not sure if we promised support for Linux at the release time - I cannot find any mention of it. But right, we would like to provide support for Linux as soon as possible.

There are multiple problems this time. First, we're a smaller team now (only one programmer, actually). Secondly, we've changed our client engine of choice to MonoGame (well, actually it's a in-house tech - Renkei engine - built on top of MonoGame, and we could switch MonoGame to something else if feels necessary to do so). MonoGame itself is cross-platform, but we decided to use DirectX for Windows as the easiest way to develop our game, so adding OpenGL support (as required for Linux) will take a considerable effort. Ideally, we would like to switch on Vulkan - it's a modern cross-platform library, but it's not supported well enough yet (I mean drivers, C# wrappers, cross-platform shader compilers).

Thirdly, we lifted the bar of modding capabilities of the game by providing completely open source gameplay assets and code. It means all the assets are come with the game (Core.cpk) in their raw form (no pre-cooked texture atlases, no custom file formats) and baked into the required format by the game engine itself when needed (with caches for faster loading next time). It also allows the game to listen to the file system changes and hot-reload changed files (all of file formats are already supported). It means that we're shipping the C# (.cs) and shader (.fx) code compilers together with the game. The bad news is that currently MGFX (MonoGame FX shader compiler) is working with two different formats for shaders - one uses HLSL and another GLSL (for DirectX and OpenGL, respectively). It means there is no single compiler which will work with .FX files supplied currently with the game on both Windows and Linux. Duplicating shaders on both shader languages is something we need to avoid at any cost (it will complicate development and modding), so we have only a few options - wait until MonoGame team implement support for HLSL shaders compilation on non-Windows platforms or switch to Vulkan, rewrite our current shaders and use the Vulkan shader compiler (which is cross-platform). The MonoGame team also have plans for adding Vulkan support to MonoGame so maybe this is a way to go.

The good news is that Microsoft will ship .NET Core 2.0 very soon which is an absolutely amazing re-implementation of .NET Framework - with better performance, completely open source and cross-platform. In theory, it might allow us to make a single build of the game which will run everywhere (if we include .NET Core runtime with the game for all the OSes we're going to support). And it's much faster and more stable than Mono, with the best ever support from Microsoft and community.

Also, NoesisGUI much improved over last years so we can expect great stability and performance this time (with VoidExpanse it was very rough for a few months after release).

As we mentioned it before, unfortunately we cannot support Linux and Mac from the very start. Support for those systems will come later, when the base game stabilizes (around beta).The reason for that is simple - this way we won't have to battle with each version to add support for those systems and instead focus all of our energy towards developing the game.

We really wish we could offer support for other systems sooner, but the reality is much more harsh... it takes a lot of time and effort to make each patch fully compatible with all OS-es, and frankly we just don't have enough resources and manpower to justify it currently.

But again, good news is - we will be able to focus entirely on the actual game and it will make it possible to reach beta much sooner, and then add Linux and Mac support!It is still our priority in the long run! All of our games fully and natively support Linux and we want to keep it that way!

The forum are quiet these days, so i just wanted to jump in and spash the silence somehow.

That is true, but not for long! I'm sure there will be plenty of activity once we launch the game!We will be sending out e-mails to people to participate in this soft-launch. Especially considering that the game will be free during this initial period.

Hi, Tchey!no progress yet. As I've explained before, it's too complicated considering the nature of the engine and that we're programming only for DirectX 11 now.However, noticeable progress done by MonoGame team, Microsoft and community (.NET Core 3.0 is awesome!), and Microsoft even made HLSL compiler opensource which is a huge step towards portability (as we can compile HLSL shaders on the players' PC in Linux, and then transform them to GLSL with other tools).